Evan Nesbit & Tatiana Berg: Surfaces, Supports.
Overview
Taking its title from the radical French artistic movement of the 1960s and 70s—and drawing conceptual parallels to Jiro Yoshihara's 1955 Gutai manifesto—Supports/Surfaces brought together contemporary painters Tatiana Berg and Evan Nesbit to examine a shared devotion to process, physical gesture, and non-traditional materiality. Bridge-building across an East Coast–West Coast divide, the exhibition highlighted two distinct approaches to paint that move past the traditional boundaries of the stretched canvas to explore the relationship between pictorial and physical space.
Project Context & Curatorial Role
Curated for Storefront Bushwick, the exhibition examined how both artists subvert conventional picture-making while maintaining an exuberant, Pop-influenced palette and a strange sense of humor.
Whether through Berg’s fast, performative slashing and freestanding "tent" paintings, or Nesbit’s slow, tactile process of pushing paint through the reverse side of burlap and wool, both practices foreground the raw, physical outcry of the medium itself. By treating the canvas not as a passive surface but as an active, three-dimensional site of investigation, the exhibition asserted that material-driven painting remains audaciously alive.
Role: Curator
Date: November 16—December 23, 2012
Location: Storefront Bushwick, Brooklyn, NY
Artists: Tatiana Berg, Evan Nesbit
